The role you don't fill also has a cost

According to SHRM, filling a position takes an average of 44 days. Six weeks in which that person's work does not get done, or gets absorbed by a team that was already full. Six weeks of decisions that stall, projects that slow down, clients that wait. None of that is counted as a hiring cost, but it is, and it usually far exceeds what the process cost.

A vacancy is not a pause, it is a leak

An open role is not a neutral state of waiting. It is an active leak. Every week that passes, the cost accumulates where nobody looks: the overload on the team that stays, which raises the risk of losing the people you do have. The project that does not start. The opportunity that goes cold. The vacancy drains below the waterline, quietly, until the damage is already done.

Fast is not the same as rushed

The answer is not to hire in a rush, lowering the bar to plug the gap. That only swaps one invoice for a worse one, the cost of a bad hire. The speed that saves money does not come from running, it comes from clarity: knowing exactly who you are looking for and what for shortens the process without giving anything up, because you stop wasting time on profiles that never fit.

The question is not how long we take to fill it. It is how much not having filled it yet is costing us. That sum is almost never done, and it can be diagnosed.